Murdoch's KGB-Friendly Series

In August, Rupert Murdoch’s FX picked up a Cold War series set in the
1980s titled “The Americans.” Liberals might have braced themselves for
the worst. It sounded like some kind of Chuck Norris-style “jingoistic”
homage to freedom-loving intelligence agents. But this is Hollywood, so
the show instead focuses on KGB spies who speak perfect English, working
to destroy Reagan-era America, which is not altogether a bad thing to
people in Hollywood.

Joe Weisberg, who worked for more than three years at the CIA, first
wrote a script about two CIA case officers stationed in Bulgaria. Fox
bought that script, too...but that project was deep-sixed. Boring. But
exploring the daily joys and sorrows of undercover Soviet agents, that
just thrills the Hollywood Left. Some things never change.

FX couldn’t create a series based on real history because that would
entail real heroes, and real villains, like CIA traitor Aldrich Ames,
who was a drunk who took on a feverishly overspending second wife, and
for enough pieces of silver, he sold state secrets to our mortal enemy.
There’s plenty of drama in that real-life story, but instead FX set out
to find nice-looking fictional Marxist-Leninists that Americans could
learn to love.

TV Guide previewed the new series, which debuts January 30, like this:
“It’s the early 1980s, the Cold War rages and President Ronald Reagan’s
sabre-rattling has the Soviet Union really nervous.” The show’s writer,
Joe Weisberg, let his radicalism out: “Most of us in the U.S.
thought Reagan was just being bombastic, but the Soviets thought he was
crazy and feared he would initiate a nuclear strike....This series, to a
large extent, is told from the perspective of the KGB and the Soviets.
We’re making them the sympathetic characters. I’d go so far as to say
they’re the heroes.”

“The Americans” isn’t about Americans. It’s about heroic defenders of
expansionist communist tyranny. The “heroes” are those who killed tens
of millions. That’s morally sick. But at FX, sickness sells.

The main characters, who are given the names Philip and Elizabeth
Jennings, were trained since their teenage years to be communist spies
and were placed in an arranged marriage, and run a travel agency in
northern Virginia as a front. Once placed in America, they have children
who have no idea of their treasonous double lives. There’s tension in
this arranged marriage, since TV Guide explained “she’s passionately
loyal to the motherland, while he’s starting to prefer the American way
of life.”

FX president John Landgraf sounded apolitical about it: “We’re proud to
welcome ‘The Americans,’ a taut series that crackles with incredible
performances rooted in character perspectives never explored on a U.S.
television series.” But focus on the phrase “character perspectives
never explored” as code for “sympathetic communist spy characters,”
words they cannot bring themselves to say.

This is not the first FX series to deal with spies, only the first
drama. The animated adult comedy “Archer,” soon to launch its fourth
season, is centered on Sterling Archer, a vaguely Sixties-era American
spy with the “International Secret Intelligence Service.” Naturally,
this agent is comically inept. Last season, Archer was assigned to guard
a prominent KGB defector, but the high-value asset was killed in an
explosion while Archer left the building for a sexual encounter with a
co-worker.

FX is a network stuffed with antiheroes. It has thrived on dramas that
glorified corrupt cops (“The Shield”), unethical, oversexed plastic
surgeons (“Nip/Tuck”), firemen who rape their wives and pressure their
teenage daughters to have sex (“Rescue Me”), mutilating and murderous
motorcycle gangs (“Sons of Anarchy”), and now domineering, perverted
nuns (“American Horror Story: Asylum”).

They are not alone. NBC has closed a deal for a pilot about Soviet
spies in Israel titled “M.I.C.E.” The title is an acronym for Money,
Ideology, Coercion and Ego, factors in understanding the motives of
spies who betray their own countries.

The show is copied from an Israeli series called “The Gordin Cell.” In
that show, set in the present, a patriotic and decorated Israeli Air
Force officer has no idea his parents were Russian spies. Their handler
then appears, demanding they recruit their son into betraying Israel.
The officer is left to choose between his family and his country.

Producer Peter Berg (who made “Friday Night Lights” for NBC) said the
original plot “lends itself very easily to an American reinvention” as a
drama set in the United States. “There are still real issues between
the U.S. and Russia – they’re spying on us, we’re spying on them.”

Somehow, the Left can never acknowledge the horrors that the Soviet
Union visited upon its own people and the people in its puppet states.
No network would ever consider a drama about sympathetic Nazi spies
undermining America during World War II. Nazi genocide is inhuman.
Communist genocide is not.

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